Jen’s book covers the downloading and Joomla! installation process, creating a site map, tracking content and images, how to perform backups with JoomlaPack, creating customized templates from the ground up, advanced styling tricks with CSS, and lots more.

In Preparing CMS Web Graphics and Layouts Using Open Source Tools, Jen Kramer shows us how developers and graphic designers can collaborate to create a great site design that integrates with a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla!, all using open-source software. So if you’ve been trying to find an effective, yet inexpensive solution for integrating a CMS into your website, be sure to check this title out.

Jen Kramer is awesome. She is the queen of Joomla!, her first book is rapidly approaching completion, she plays a mean flute, and she’s in town recording a couple of really cool CMS courses for lynda.com (CMS Website Strategy and Planning, and Preparing CMS Web Graphics and Layouts Using Open Source). Hooray for more Jen Kramer content! We took her to lunch at a local vegan/raw restaurant on Friday, because we wanted to give her the “Southern California Experience”—and because we think it’s yummy. Looking forward to your next visit out here, Jen!

lynda.com Joomla! instructor Jen Kramer is in the midst of writing her first book.

Talented lynda.com Joomla! instructor Jen Kramer is in the midst of writing her first book, entitled Joomla! Start to Finish: How to Plan, Execute, and Maintain Your Website which is available now as an Amazon.com pre-order. Congrats Jen!

We’ve been enjoying her blog posts and tweets that have been keeping us looped into the Joomla! world, and now her book-writing experiences. It’s a much longer process than recording a lynda.com training course, and she’s doing a beautiful job of it. When I asked about the differences between book writing and video training, she had this to say:

“In a movie, I have to think carefully about a single example and the flow of one task to another. Personally, I don’t need a lot of notes—I can wax poetic about Joomla off the top of my head.

“In the book, I spend much more time explaining screens, because I can’t necessarily show how they work the way you can in a movie. There is much more to say and explain in a book, little things that I might normally talk about in a movie, or not even say, just do.

“I’m trying to make this book much more than the usual ‘click here’ type of book. So many technical books explain how to complete certain tasks, but they never explain why you’re doing what you’re doing. My lynda.com movies are popular, I think, because I took the time to explain certain error messages you might get (and what you did wrong to get them), why you might want to do one thing over another, and certain ways to enhance your Joomla site that really bring value to the final product, not necessarily just because you can do them.”

Good news, Joomla! true believers—Joomla! 1.6 will be released in its alpha version no later than June 22, 2009, according to Rob Schley, one of the core developers on the project. I enjoyed hearing Rob speak at Joomla! Day New England, held on May 30, 2009, in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Like me, your immediate thought is whether you should download it and start learning the newest version of Joomla!. As an alpha version, it’s likely to be full of bugs and landmines. You should definitely not consider using the alpha version to develop a real site for a client. The alpha is expected to be followed shortly by a beta and some release candidates, with the release version due out at the end of 2009.

Normally one might expect that as Joomla! 1.6 is released, Joomla! 1.5 support will become limited. (For example, Joomla! 1.0 support ends on July 22, 2009, and extension support for Joomla! 1.0 has been decreasing for some time.) However, this is not going to be the case.

Joomla! 1.5 will remain the “stable”, production environment for Joomla!. The 1.6 branch will be seen as quick-moving and somewhat experimental, as the core development team adds new, badly needed functionalities (better permissions system, multiple categories, and tags among them). As those technologies mature in the 1.6 branch, they might port some of the functionality back to 1.5.

Looking far into the future, Joomla! 1.7 will also be part of the faster moving track of Joomla!, while Joomla! 1.8 may become a new stable version to replace Joomla! 1.5. Both tracks will converge with Joomla! 2.0. (I don’t have dates for any of these releases.)

The plan is to support Joomla! 1.5 for at least three years, Jan 2008-Jan 2011. Of course, the further out we get in time, the less defined anything is and the more subject it is to change.

lynda.com is keeping up with the fast-moving world of Joomla!, so watch this space for more movies coming to a computer screen near you!

Hi, I’m Megan, the Author Relations Manager here at lynda.com. From time to time, I’ll be sharing author news, interviews, and articles that our awesome authors have contributed to. Here’s the first batch of goodies!

Jen Kramer McKibben, author of “Joomla! Advanced CSS” and “Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates”, is highlighted as a Joomla! instructor and community leader who does it all! Check it out here:

Derrick Story, (author of MANY iPhoto & other digital photography courses) interviews printing professional Joseph Stefanchik on his site the Digital Story, and gets some cool insight on making really cool prints!

Maria Langer contacted me by Twitter and said she’d love it if you asked the same question about a WordPress course. Now I’m wondering if we couldn’t make this a more generic series of movies, suitable for Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla. They all have the same starting place for their customized templates/themes — a static HTML web page.

Tom Geller (lynda.com Drupal Essential Training author) has been coordinating a CMS Overview course that would explain the strengths and weaknesses of the different systems and help newcomers navigate which choice to make.

So, open question to you all – what are we missing in our various CMS courses?